Jon Burgerman & Hattie Stewart
   Jon Burgerman and Hattie Stewart were the first artists that
inspired my CoP work. They initially informed me that celebrity images that have been clearly tampered with separate themselves from the typical, boring imagery that the media is saturated with. Bold, unique imagery really stands out and speaks to people.
Madame Tussauds, Marco Ventura, Josie Jammet
Visiting Madame Tussauds made me excited about my project. I was fascinated with the way people engage with this art, and I believe that much more of the population can appreciate art if it represents something or someone they are familiar with; something to measure the likeness against. These artists made me want to focus on celebrity portraits, particularly the construction of celebrity.
Fan Consumption
Feedback from a group crit prompted me to take a slightly different direction. If I could make my own celebrity, I would be more effectively illustrating construction of celebrity. My first idea was to create a fan’s scrapbook, to show how fans react to celebrities. It would have included news clippings, screen grabs of social media profiles, collection of merch, etc.
Making Images – First try However, lots of feedback highlighted that a scrapbook would be unnecessary. The project could be so much bigger than a scrapbook. My peers suggested that I take a more illustrative route, to make sure I use my talents; e.g. perfume packaging, or magazine covers. I attempted drawing a portrait of Sophie, but I didn’t like it. It wasn’t bold enough, it was too wispy. It wouldn’t stand out very well.
Hodaya Lewis and David Downton
Upon further research, I found Hodaya Lewis and David Downton. They are examples of people who use celebrities in their illustration work within fashion and beauty. This was about the same time that I was gathering research on celebrity cosmetics and decided I wanted to create a MAC campaign.
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Makeup Campaign #1 I began to plan my workload, picking to do a VOGUE cover, Make-up campaign, H&M campaign and a W magazine cover. Unfortunately, when I saw the fashion illustrator’s work, I decided to paint in my usual digital way, instead of thinking that I should develop my work and take inspiration from them. My next lot of feedback criticized that if I am doing illustrated campaigns, I should make the images more graphic, other wise they could just be photographs and there is no point in painting them. I thought that this might be a chance to develop my composition, too. I often stick something in the middle and leave a blank back ground.
Makeup Campaign #2, H&M Campaign My second try was slightly better, but I didn’t think that the images looked good enough to be a part of beauty and fashion campaigns. At this point I became really stuck. It took me a while to make anything, because I wasn’t excited about it anymore and I began to get stressed.
Komelia Debosz, Sarah Hankinson, Sandra Suy I’m glad I found these fashion illustrators and many more; they got me back into my project and inspired my final images. I realised that I was trying to do too many things and I was over complicating the images, instead of making them stand out more. I thought these images were really beautiful and simple, standing out from usual beauty and fashion photography. This was just what I needed to get back in to making work. I started to make simple drawings of Sophie’s face, whilst highlighting the most important bits such as her trademark pink hair and the things that the campaign will be advertising.
How T.I’s Album Cover Inspired One of my Final images As well as these portraits, I still wanted to eliminate blank space. I was struggling to do this until I saw T.I’s album art; the main illustration is in the middle, and there is some sort of water colour/ tea stained texture in the back. I really liked it and decided to make a similar sponge texture to add to my image. As well as some water colour splashes I’d made before whilst playing with media.
Final Images The making of my final images was fairly straight forward. I wish I could have made more images, but after all of the development work, I didn’t have a lot of time left. I wanted to create social media pages and actually make Sophie famous, but I quickly realised that this would take much more time, people, and good luck to pull it off. Instead I made the pages, and based on those, I mocked up images of what Sophie’s pages would look like if she had millions of fans.